The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907-1922 (Volume 1)

The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of
fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a
style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so
much of what he wrote for experience, that’s because he set it up that
way, signing himself ‘Old Master’ when he was barely 18. He made the
fiction true, including the fiction of himself, and then struggled to
keep up with it. There’s a drawing at the end of a letter written
while he was in hospital in Italy in 1918, little more than a stick
drawing, of a man lying in bed, his legs all bandaged up, shouting:
‘Gimme a drink!’ ‘Ernie’ has captioned this: ‘Me. Drawn from Life.’
This cartoon character, Ernie, was the prototype of the man who became
Frederic Henry, the twisted hero who knows his way around a martini
and a bottle of Asti, though the man and his wounds and his appetites
are further from Hemingway’s own reality than the author could bear.